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"With this difference," added Steinmetz, "that the moujik will one day make the discovery. He is beginning to make it now. The starosta is quite right, Paul. There is something in the air. It is about time that you took the ladies away from here and left me to manage it alone." "That time will never come again," answered Paul. "I am not going to leave you alone again."
The Stranglers are not moved by any unconscious sentiment. Their belief is the logical application of a doctrine of pessimism, whose terrible consequences they have adopted, although they know not its terminology. What is the life of a moujik worth? Nothing, or nearly nothing. Is it not well, then, to accelerate the coming of deliverance?
This hostility, of which the seeds were primarily sown by the closing of his school and inquisition of his private papers in the summer of 1862, soon grew to proportions far greater than those arising from a personal wrong. The dumb and submissive moujik found in Tolstoy a living voice to express his sufferings. Tolstoy was well fitted by nature and circumstances to be the peasant's spokesman.
It would have been contrary to human nature if people who were subject to assaults from above and kicks from below, whose right of residence was limited to one-twentieth of the territory of their fatherland, who were robbed of shelter, air, and bread, and deprived of the hope to place themselves, even by means of military service, on an equal footing with the lowest Russian moujik, should have felt a profound need of sacrificing themselves for their country, and should not have shirked this heaviest of civil obligations to a larger extent than the privileged Russian population, in which cases of evasion were by no means infrequent.
At mid-day they stopped before a peasant's hut, in the doorway of which a moujik stood, wrapped in sheepskin and with long and shaggy hair and beard. "Good-day, brother; how goes it?" asked Paul, for he knew a little of the language. "Good-day, little father; thank God, it goes well with me," the man answered. "What is your pleasure?
Leo Tolstoy might well have lived in a tub or carried a lantern by day, like the most sensational and theatrical of the ancients. He is only a past master of réclame, of the art of advertising. The Moujik blouse and those delightful tableaux of a real nobleman shoemaking and haymaking make his books sell. That is all.
Moujik, a peasant: his duties are those of a farm laborer, yet this phrase would not be a fair translation. This word, which is rendered "tiller of the soil," has no exact equivalent in English. Korolevitch, from korol: king. The endings evitch and evna show descent, korolevitch meaning son of a king; korolevna meaning daughter of a king. Dutch trumpet, i.e., an imported trumpet.
If there is any teacher who dominates Russian thought and Russian affairs to-day, it is Tolstoy. And from whom did Tolstoy learn more than from that conserver of the pristine and dominating Russian traits, the moujik?
It might have been expected that a German influence so absolutely supreme in every sphere of society, in every walk of life, should have extended to the lower classes. But the common people were never affected by German methods and remained untainted by the German spirit. To the Russian moujik, the German remained the Niemets, the mute, the alien enemy.
It was very bitter to me to leave my Fatherland, but as the moujik says: 'Necessity brings everything. So we parted from our friends with many tears: little had we thought we should be so broken up in our old age. But what else could I do in such a wretched country? As the moujik says: 'If the goat doesn't want to go to market it is compelled to go. So I started for London.
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